I have been checking Circuit City online every day and yesterday they showed stock of the BDP 1200 at several stores so I ran down and picked one up.

Now for the review:

I have a Samsung 5296D 1080P LCD panel hooked up to HDMI for testing

I compared the PS3 the Sony BDPS1 and the Samsung BDP1000 all with the latest firmware and this unit by far has the best picture. Bright vivid colors rich blacks. I really prefer it over the other players. The picture really just looks significantly better than the other players. It just blows me away how good it looks. Disk load times are very quick and I have had no glitches playing back disks. This unit really feels like a generation two unit.
There are more settings on the player than the BDP1000. There is movie frame 24FS mode. There is a HDMI setup mode that has Anynet+ HDMI-CEC. There is a sharpness mode was set by default to off. There is a DVD noise reduction mode witch I turned on to low setting and it seemed to smooth out the picture on the Departed DVD that I tried. There is also system upgrade mode for upgrading the unit. There is an Ethernet port on the back.
Now here is the real selling point for me and many others. I make my own bluray BD-R And BD-RE. and this player plays back both BDAV and BDMV SPECIFICATION perfectly with no skipping or glitches. This is something no other player can do right now. . By the way the quaility of BDMV is far superior to the Sony BDS1 and the ps3 when comparing BD-R AND BD-RE.

Thank you Samsung for producing a truly state of the art player.

Update for testing purposes I had the 24FS mode activated and I just got asked how is the sound quality. Well useing bitstream out with a optical cable the volume on my Onkyo 7.1 seemed to be a little less powerful but the sound seemed to be sharper and more distinct. As if you could here more of the details, very impressive. Also the remote is very responsive and works very well. Upconverted look very good as well and you can control how they look with the DVD noise reduction feature.

Great first post and nice review. Welcome to the forum. Glad to hear so many positives about the unit, as I'm tired of waiting and looking to buy in. You do say 24p mode works, is that right? Can your LCD handle that as an input? If so, does it look noticeably different from 60p?

From the posts above, it sounds like 1080p24 support is in the shipping product. If true, I've got to commend Samsung. That makes the BD-P1200 the first Blu-ray player on the market with 1080p24 output and HDMI 1.3, to allow output of advanced audio codecs to an upcoming HDMI 1.3 receiver for decoding.

[And yes, unlike most HD-DVD titles, most Blu-ray titles are authored in basic HDMV and will output the TrueHD and DTS-HD bitstream over HDMI 1.3.]

I'm still curious to know whether 1080p24 output mode is available for DVD playback, a feature missing from the Sony and Pioneer BD players.

I've got to commend Samsung. That makes the BD-P1200 the first Blu-ray player on the market with 1080p24 output and HDMI 1.3, to allow output of advanced audio codecs to an upcoming HDMI 1.3 receiver for decoding.

Yes, very commendable. If I want TrueHD with this player I get to spend another grand or so on a receiver.

There are four CC's in the Houston area, and by Houston, they included College Station, with these in stock. Do I want to pay $200 more to have one tonight? Nah. Definitely not an April's Fool joke, though. It's out.

Muellerfilm - Can you post what this player actually does include? Also, do you have any of the deinterlacing test discs?

Regardless of how great the player is, and I suspect it will upconvert DVDs really nicely, a HDMI 1.3 player should have True HD decoders. This really is inexcusable when a cheap player like the HDA2 has it. Why bother with 1.3 then?

The lack of True HD on players just give the morons at Warner more reasons to avoid putting lossless audio on Blu-ray discs.

Sony's "Identity" has 3 PCM tracks that take up a ton of space. It's not a long movie so it doesn't matter, but multiple language tracks are going to be thing in the future, so why not start with the hardware?

I think Sony even said that they plan to phase out PCM eventually by next year.

The unit includes the remote, composite video cables and users manual that's it no HDMI cable included like the bdp1000. The 24fps mode is really noticeable on my Samsung 5296 LCD. Also the upconverted DVD's look fantastic. Best up conversion I have ever seen and you can you can set three settings for DVD noise reduction playback low med ium and high. I used the low setting and compared Basic instinct 2 DVD vs. Blu Ray and I was very impressed how good the up conversion DVD version looked.
I really love this player and would highly recommend it to anyone looking for a full featured blu ray player. This is truly a second generation unit with much improved picture quailty. When I saw this player demo'd At CES afew month's back I new it it looked better than any blu ray player that I had seen I now that I have one I can confirm. The Samsung Reps were really giving a sales pitch on how this player would be superior to the other players on the market and now I believe them.

While I am interested in seeing this player in action it can't be any better than the Sony for video quality. The Sony tests perfectly as a BD player. Full resolution for luma and chroma, no CUE, no pixel cropping, no clipping. You can't improve on it via HDMI.

I wonder if the Samsung is a true 24p output or if they are using the Reon chip. I don't konw if it has a bypass or not. Will have to look into it.